Whispering gallery
room in which echoes and magnifies sound in an unusual way
A whispering gallery is usually a circular, hemispherical, elliptical or ellipsoidal enclosure, often beneath a dome or a vault, in which whispers can be heard clearly in other parts of the gallery. Such galleries can also be set up using two parabolic dishes. Sometimes the phenomenon is detected in caves.
Theory
A whispering gallery is most simply constructed in the form of a circular wall, and allows whispered communication from any part of the internal side of the circumference to any other part. The sound is carried by waves, known as whispering-gallery waves, that travel around the circumference clinging to the walls, an effect that was discovered in the whispering gallery of St Paul's Cathedral in London. The extent to which the sound travels at St Paul's can also be judged by clapping in the gallery, which produces four echoes. Other historical examples are the Gol Gumbaz mausoleum in Bijapur, India and the Echo Wall of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. A hemispherical enclosure will also guide whispering gallery waves. The waves carry the words so that others will be able to hear them from the opposite side of the gallery.
The gallery may also be in the form of an ellipse or ellipsoid, with an accessible point at each focus.
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This entry incorporates text from “Whispering gallery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.